Based on the data of compounds known from the literature to be active against various types of Ser/Thr kinases a general pharmachophore model for these types of kinases was developed. Search for the molecules fitting to this pharmacophore among ASINEX proprietary library revealed a number of compounds, which were tested and appeared to possess some activity against such Ser/Thr kinases as Aurora A, Aurora B and Haspin.

Our work on optimization of these molecules to Aurora A kinase allowed us to achieve several hits in 3-5 nM range of activity, with rather good selectivity and ADME properties.

Thus we showed the possibility of performing the fine-tuning of the general Ser/Thr pharmacophore designed to desired types of kinase to get active and selective compounds.